CONGRESSIONAL Republicans have a habit of seizing on a good idea and then using it to push another completely different agenda.

That's what happened with AmeriCorps, the national service agency started by President Clinton in 1993. President Bush has proposed expanding the corps from 50,000 largely youthful volunteers to 75,000, and to increase its funding by $273 million to make that happen.

But buried in the bill was a seemingly innocuous item. It required that the pledge taken by AmeriCorps volunteers be brought in line with those taken by other federal employees.

It turns out the AmeriCorps pledge, taken by thousands of volunteers for nearly a decade, makes no mention of God or the Constitution. Rather, the pledge focuses on the AmeriCorps mission: community service. "Faced with apathy, I will take action," enrollees would recite. "Faced with conflict, I will seek common ground. Faced with adversity, I will persevere . . . I will get things done."

No one in AmeriCorps is known to have complained about the old pledge. To the contrary, many graduates of the program have framed the pledge, as a reminder of why they signed up and as a guide for their lives after AmeriCorps.

Yet, AmeriCorps officials have rushed to change the pledge, even though the bill never made it beyond the committee, and would have to be reintroduced in the next Congress.

Officials have posted a new pledge, this one stripped of the poetic cadences of the old pledge. Enrollees will now pledge to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States . . . without any mental reservation . . . So help me God."

AmeriCorps officials say the new pledge is a "draft" and it is "voluntary." They say it's consistent with the pledge taken by all federal employees.

Yet, as AmeriCorps officials themselves concede, enrollees aren't federal employees. Rather they work for 2,000 nonprofit organizations that provide services ranging from child care to building low-income housing. In return, they get a stipend of $9,300 a year.

What's going on here? Messing with the pledge reflects the efforts of the Bush administration to invoke the name of God and other religious symbols in public life.

Whether intended or not, the pledge change is now fused with a religious backlash to the controversial ruling last June by the Ninth CircuitU.S. Court of Appeals declaring the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional.

We support AmeriCorps. We support increasing the number of Americans who participate in it. But altering a pledge that has inspired thousands of volunteers is nothing more than a crude attempt to insert politics -- and religion -- into what up to now has been an exemplary program. Bring back the old pledge.